Friday, April 21, 2006

Back in the seventies and eighties, I used to listen rather queasily to Roy Masters' call-in show. A former stage hypnotist turned cult leader, he's a raving misogynist whose obsessive loathing of human sexuality in general, and female sexuality in particular, makes his figurative offspring Dr. Laura sound like Rusty Warren.

Like the Preacher in Night of the Hunter, Masters and the Almighty worked out a religion betwixt themselves, and Masters has no patience with anyone who can't keep up from day to day with its seemingly improvised tenets. His "faith" is vaguely Eastern, with a syncretic overlay of hard-right pseudo-Judaism. In a sense, he's something of a throwback to theosophists like C.W. Leadbeater - whose idea of "prophylactic masturbation" he's occasionally espoused - with the empire-building pedagogical inclinations of a Norman McLaren. Most of the time, he sounds like Rex Harrison channelling the Reverend Moon.

Masters founded Talk Radio Network, which syndicates Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham. But until today, I was unaware of his interesting ties to WorldNetDaily:

The most direct connection between WorldNetDaily and Masters is David Kupelian, WND's vice president and managing editor. In the early 1990s, Kupelian was managing editor of a Masters-published magazine called New Dimensions. The magazine's tagline was "The Psychology Behind the News," but it appears to have been merely a conservative-oriented magazine taking on such issues as opposing abortion and gun control and supporting convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard....

Masters sold New Dimensions in April 1992 to a group headed by Lee Bellinger, longtime publisher of the right-wing, national security-oriented newsletter American Sentinel. Joseph Farah served for a time as its editor-in-chief, a tenure that apparently started after the sale....

Masters also was a part owner of the company that syndicated graveyard-shift radio conspiracy promoter Art Bell; Kupelian served as editor of Bell's newsletter for two years.

Kupelein, appropriately enough, is the author of a book called The Marketing of Evil. On the occasion of its publication, Michelle Malkin said, "Now watch the cockroaches run for cover." Apropos of which:

[D]espite this intertwining of Masters' and WND's interests, Masters is mentioned only three times in WorldNetDaily articles....[T]he links between WND and Masters seem a little too numerous to be coincidental. Is it a business relationship? Are WND bigwigs Masters' followers? Perhaps it's time for WND to start talking about it.